[CGFX] - lcReproject - a texturing tool shader

chronic

I was inspired by Brice Vandermoortele’s Normal Map Reprojection Shader and wanted to extend the idea to new uses. This is a novel way of texturing using lit sphere images and cubemaps. You can also reproject color and normal textures to a new UV Set.

lcReproject.cgfx

Here is a video describing its use:
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFuykgYSNOA[/ame]

A couple guys at the office have been using this to good effect, if anyone has suggestions or feedback I'm happy to have it.

As a CGFX shader, only Nvidia cards will load this reliably, but I’ve added a arbfp1 technique that might work on AMD and older cards. Cubemaps are lower quality and don’t have any blurring using this mode.

haikai

This looks very interesting. I have a crap ATI card so I didn't bother testing the shader, but I was wondering if the view where you show the UV layout in the viewport is actual geometry that has been split along the UV borders and then flattened to match the UVs or is it just pixels rendering on top of the viewport?

BTW, I noticed the retopo tool you made. Looks really handy, and I'll definitely be trying it out soon.

Funky Bunnies

this is badass, i didnt even realize you were leo all this time. I love your hair shader too! i wish i knew enough about shader languages to even begin to understand it

definitely gonna have to give this workflow a whirl, thanks!

kodde

Cool stuff chronic, wasn't aware that you could these kind of things directly in the viewport with a CGFX shader.

Xoliul

I wrote something like this too at work, last month. Not for Lit spheres though, it projects modelplanes onto a blockout and reprojects them to another UV set while you control blending an falloff. Looks like we both had the same idea at the same time

chronic

@haikai, kodde - its interesting because your actual geometry remains untouched, but instead of rendering each point at its location on the surface the shader renders them at a location in UV space. Also if you edit your uv's in the UV Texture Editor, the viewport will update in real-time. It can look a little funky because the layout will always fit the rectangle of your viewport, but as long as your Rendered Image is square everything lines up.

@Xoliul - keeps me motivated to know people are out there coming up with interesting new ideas